In the woodworking industry the formation of contoured or shaped pieces such as molding and the like are often necessary. As one operation in the fabrication of such pieces, it is necessary to finish sand or grind the shaped piece to prepare it for painting or finishing. In accomplishing such a step there is utilized a generally circular sanding or abrading wheel which has the periphery thereof shaped as a mirror image of the piece of molding to be sanded. The wheel is placed on a vertically oriented spindle, commonly called a spindle sander, and the strip of wood to be sanded or ground is moved in a generally tangential path adjacent the periphery of the rotating wheel.
There are literally hundreds of peculiar shapes of molding which must be sanded by a typical furniture plant, and therefore the plant must carry or be able to fabricate an equal number of sanding wheels each with a peripheral surface configuration corresponding to one of the molded shapes. In conventional practice, in order to form these sanding wheels a blank stone or wheel is rotated on a lathe or other spindle and a highly skilled workman manually operates a shaping tool to form the contours on the surface of the wheel in accordance with a drawing or sample piece of molding. This is mainly done by an eye to eye comparison which requires considerable skill on the part of the craftsman and many hours, thus making the formation of such a sanding wheel very expensive.
One attempt to eliminate the manual approach and the requirement for skilled craftsmanship was unsuccessfully attempted by the assignee within the last several years. This attempt included a machine table with a motor mounted on the upper surface thereof with a horizontally extending shaft and a tool which was moved along the surface of the wheel and simultaneously moved radially thereof to form the peripheral surface of the sanding wheel in accordance with a sample profile. This device was similar to a profile lathe. Several problems existed with this embodiment which could not be overcome and as a result the attempt failed. One problem was that the size and cost of the self contained unit was prohibitively expensive. Further, the connecting linkage between the sample profile and the tool activating mechanism resulted in inaccuracies. Also when the sanding wheel was removed from the spindle of the profile lathe device then repositioned on the spindle sander, variances in the mounting of the spindle for cutting, then repositioning for sanding resulted in many unsatisfactory work pieces.